CRM Business Intelligence & Customer Analytics

CRM analytics deliver timely and insightful patterns, notifications or other information about a company's customers and those customer behaviors, thereby, enabling the company to better predict and respond to customers for growth initiatives or other strategic benefits. Put simply, CRM analytics enable decision makers to make better and more timely business decisions. Despite the clear upside of better information, few CRM software adopters have implemented CRM analytics. This channel provides the in-depth market research, product reviews and recommended strategies for maximizing your use and payback from business intelligence (BI) and CRM analytics.

CRM Analytics Tools

CRM analytics tools are typically part of broader business intelligence (BI) software suites, which may consist of data warehouses, data mining applications and online analytical processing (OLAP). These BI tools aggregate, model and disseminate the high volumes of customer transactions and activities in visual, easy to understand views so that business leaders can learn from the information and take action to improve their companies.

Featured CRM Analytics Articles

The increasing rate of data volumes, velocities and varieties has defined the concept of Big Data, and more importantly a new opportunity to better transform data from raw form into business intelligence. Here we provide an executive’s guide to making the business case for Big Data, and empowering more people to make better business decisions.

Big data can deliver powerful insights to manufacturers to spur improved product forecasting, more successful product introductions, improvements to the supply chain and much more. When equipping products with sensors, machine generated big data can show how a product is being consumed, when maintenance is needed and when the product is approaching the end of its useful life.

Business Intelligence is one of the few sustainable competitive advantages available to banks, insurance companies and capital market organizations. However, research shows the distance between leaders and laggards is large and the journey to better decision making is a complex undertaking. This article examines the research and shares best practices to use big data for increased profits.

Microsoft has long been providing Business Intelligence (BI) platform technologies such as SQL Server Analysis Service (SSAS), but has long been absent from delivering rich client or presentation layer technologies such as Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). This Power BI review shares the advantages and disadvantages of Microsoft's rapidly expanding solution.

Cognitive computing is a disruptive technology that will offer competitive advantage to early adopters. However, the promise of cognitive systems is not well understood and cognitive messaging is slow to resonate as it is abstract and not tangible. This post defines cognitive computing, shares its unique benefits and provides some interesting real world examples.

According to Dr. Marc Teerlink, "Every day consumers and enterprises create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data"—giving rise to tremendous business insight IF you harness the data to make better business decisions. This article suggests two and half methods to leverage data in your CRM system to increase customer acquisitions and bottom line profits.

While some CRM efficiencies are easily observed, the more profound insights will go unnoticed and unexploited until you integrate a customer analytics component. Analytics flush out correlations, isolate patterns and track trends among volumes of customers, allowing your organization to tailor the customer experience for improved engagement, incremental business and better profits.

CRM software systems accumulate increasing volumes of information. However, the desire for more and faster information has to be balanced with the tools to interpret, flex and act upon that information. Enter customer analytics, the one big hope to mine and model customer information and thus pour pure gold into company coffers.

Not all CRM analytics measures and performance indicators are created equal, meaning not all of them are terribly useful. The challenge is in being able to tell which customer analytics will spur your company forward and which will leave you groping for profits in the dark. Prioritizing the highest impact performance metrics helps managers achieve the most strategic goals in the shortest time.

Sears is in trouble. To reverse the tide, the new CEO is driving an increased focus toward achieving customer loyalty. The retailer is heavily promoting its loyalty program, Shop Your Way Rewards, designed to collect loads of customer data in exchange for discounts and freebies. This is a live case study in how Sears is using customer data to save itself.

The election shows what’s possible with social and mobile technologies and highlights the importance of big data collection and the relevance of modern analytics. Analytics enabled micro targeting that gave the political practitioners the raw materials to customize messages for particular voters, to deliver those messages and to be sure they were seen, and therein is a key finding for all of business.

Data is not the same as information and business intelligence (BI) has traditionally been about reporting while analytics has been about understanding. Without correct expectations, the right tools, and close integration to CRM software, BI may render information, but without context or history will still leave executives groping for meaning.

CRM analytics are being adopted in conjunction with social CRM (SCRM) projects in order to provide the means to measure and justify social CRM's business performance and financial payback. Social CRM is a case in point symbiotic example of a new business strategy advancing almost hand in hand with the implementation of CRM analytics.

10 Step Strategic Approach to Successful BI Deployment

Business intelligence software tools transform raw data into useful information and distribute this insight to all who can use it, when they need it, in order to improve decision making timeliness and accuracy. However, BI or CRM analytics software tools without accompanying strategy, business process support and IT alignment will risk implementation, challenge adoption, and likely not achieve objectives or ROI. This advisory shares a 10 step strategic approach to successfully plan, justify and deploy a BI or CRM analytics solution.Read the 10 Steps to Successful Business Intelligence Solutions »

Today your CRM software most likely delivers the same value to your customer whether it is the first, 101st or 1,000,001st transaction. Analytics can fix that. Go To ...

CRM Software's Search for BI

Analytics Is the Social Secret Sauce

What businesses are looking for to improve customer processes is more intelligence, especially intelligence in understanding the customer's intent. Go To ...

Thought leader Pombriant explains how with analytics you can delve into data to ask questions of the why and why not and learn how things really get interesting. Go To ...

CRM Analytics Facts & Figures

According to Gartner's Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant, the BI market is growing at a compound rate of 8.1% annually.

Gartner predicts that by 2015, more than 85% of Fortune 500 companies will have failed to effectively exploit Big Data to achieve competitive advantage.

31% of BI projects are declared successful and 36% of executives have confidence that the right information is available to the right people at the right time, according to a business intelligence survey performed by IDC and DM Review.

Aberdeen Group reports that best-in-class BI adopters are 2.3-times more likely than other companies to use SaaS BI tools. Similarly, IDC forecasts that the business analytics software as a service (SaaS) market will grow more than three times as fast as the total business analytics software market.